Truly, you, who have redundant stores, sustain tremendous responsibilities; would that you might realize them.  You enjoy glorious privileges; will you slight them?  With the power, under God, of relieving the sorrowful, enlightening the ignorant, elevating the degraded, and diffusing a vital energy through every pore of this suffering world, will you stand like some bleak Alpine cliff, breathing perpetual frost, merely an object for the curious to gaze upon? so live that your selfish heirs shall rejoice at your death, and the judgment-day clothe you with eternal shame?

Do you say, “My money is my own; I may use it as I please?” Hark!  God thunders, “Thy gold and thy silver is mine.”  Will you trifle with Jehovah’s voice, and incur his righteous wrath?  Hear the terrible denunciations of James:  “Go to, now, ye rich men, weep, and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you.  Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten.  Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire.”  Absorbed in the pursuits of gain, or whirling on your glittering rounds of pleasure, you may heedlessly disregard the appeals of distressed humanity, and proudly congratulate yourselves on your exalted positions, your honors and flatteries; but, rely upon it, you are only heaping “treasure together for the last day.”  Every call of charity from which you turn coldly away will be a drop of anguish to your undying soul.  How trifling your gifts to the Lord, compared with the vastly greater sacrifices of many far poorer than yourself, and whom, perhaps, you now despise.  When these shall shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father, where, O, where will you be found?  O, how will all that affluence in which you have garnered up your hopes appear, when hearing the voice of your Final Judge, “Inasmuch as you did it not to one of the least of these my brethren, ye did it not to me;” and bereft of your treasures and your hopes together, you find the prison of despair a dread reality, where covetousness will eternally work without restraint, and unrelieved; a fire shut up in the soul, agonizing it evermore?

Will the young refuse to enter upon this systematic course of doing good?—­You who are in the warm glow of youthful affections and sympathies, I presume are not prepared to answer in the negative.  You feel that it would be delightful, the highest grade of human excellence, to go about scattering charities—­feeding the hungry, relieving distress, smoothing the dying pillow, and sending the light of salvation to those on whom the dayspring of the Saviour’s mercy has never dawned.  This, perhaps, you intend to do at some future time; but you cannot now; you have not the ability; you must first amass the means.  But let me warn you; here lies the treacherous pitfall.  You have within a subtle and malignant principle, whose maturity is utterly destructive of benevolence.  This